When you enter office in January 2009, David will have just started third grade. This is a vital year for him; by the end of the year, he must be reading well. If he is not, he will have only a 1 in 10 chance of going to college (Teach for America, 2007). As a minority student attending school in a low-income community, David is already likely to be three grade levels behind his peers in more affluent neighborhoods. His school building has been recently renovated and his classroom is full of brand new computers and textbooks. Although these make David excited to go to school, none of them come close to determining whether David will read. Research tells us that his success in fact rests in large part on the quality of his teacher (Hanushek & Rivkin, 2007; Sanders & Rivers, 1996). A highly effective teacher—compared to a less effective teacher—could move David up 10 percentile points by the end of the year (Gordon, Kane, & Staiger, 2006), a first step towards his long-term success in school.

It is up to you to alter this course for students like David. To do so, you must ensure that these students are taught by effective teachers. Although addressing human capital in school systems is complex and controversial, the potential it holds for radically improving student gains is reason enough to pursue an aggressive national agenda that recruits, trains and supports more effective teachers. Without taking on human capital in this labor intensive industry, all other reforms will fall short.

Addressing teacher effectiveness is a national responsibility that other nations have already taken seriously. A recent study commissioned by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) identified that, of all of the strategies used by the top school systems across the 30 OECD countries, “getting the right people to become teachers” and “developing them into effective instructors” were two of the three practices critical to developing successful school systems (Barber & Mourshed, 2007).

In the American public education system today, managing the people who provide for our children is one of the greatest challenges facing schools, districts, states, and the federal government. Our nation’s public education system includes more than 6.5 million employees spread across 15,000 districts and 116,665 schools (Strizek, et al, 2006). At the fulcrum of our school improvement efforts are the 3.5 million teachers who most directly drive student outcomes on a daily basis. Although roughly three education dollars in four are put towards human capital, spending has been chronically misaligned from more essential school improvement goals. From policy to the bully pulpit, you can help fix this. …

In the 10 years since its founding, NewSchools has moved from a couple of desks in Silicon Valley to a national force, uniquely positioned to identify and support innovative efforts in public education.

In those years, education entrepreneurs have moved from isolated success to become a movement and, increasingly, a household concept.

The report highlights the accomplishments of these entrepreneurs thus far. It also describes the key supports that NewSchools provides to help these entrepreneurs build healthy organizations that take their ideas to scale, and the powerful impact of bringing together networks of practitioners to collaborate and problem solve together.

The work of NewSchools, however, is far from finished. The goal that these entrepreneurs have set before themselves – not simply to improve schools, but to erase the gap separating the education of low income kids from that of their more wealthy peers – has not been fully achieved. Despite undeniable progress and the remarkable benefits that it has brought, there is much more to do. We need more good schools in our toughest neighborhoods. We need to do more to fix schools that are broken, to put great teachers in front of the kids who need them most, to find smarter ways to measure kids’ learning, to equip teachers and principals with the skills they need. The final section of the report articulates some of the areas that NewSchools sees great potential for entrepreneurial solutions.

﻿Since 2005, NewSchools Venture Fund and the Aspen Institute have convened leaders in educational entrepreneurship, philanthropy, policymaking and research for the Annual Gathering of Education Entrepreneurs in Aspen, Colorado.

This year, participants focused on two key areas for opportunity and need for reform in public education: federal policy and R&D.

When data serves as the foundation and culture of school systems, curriculum and instruction can be more closely tailored to each students’ particular academic needs.

The key findings from this national, qualitative study are delineated in the report entitled, Acting on Data: How Urban High Schools Use Data to Improve Instruction. In this study, Dr. Amanda Datnow and her colleagues take a close look at how teachers are using student data to inform a more responsive and targeted instructional program. The study also examines how school systems, both charter and district, are supporting educators in their use of data. This research builds on our previous study of data-driven instruction at the elementary level resulting in the 2006 report, “Achieving with Data: How High-Performing School Systems Use Data to Improve Instruction for Elementary Students.” Both studies were conducted in partnership with the Center on Educational Governance at the University of Southern California’s Rossier School of Education.

We believe the report will be useful to educators since it both illustrates effective practices and illuminates some of the challenges inherent in fostering a culture of data use in our schools. From the start of this research, we set out to make this report and accompanying materials useful to practitioners. To this end, we’ve collected the templates and tools from our research and compiled them into a practitioner workbook for easy copy, modification and re-use. Permissions have been granted from all participating schools and school systems to repurpose and/or modify these documents.

The NewSchools Venture Fund Summit 2008 marked an exciting milestone, as the year of NewSchools’ 10th anniversary and an inflection point for the entrepreneurial education movement.

When Kim Smith launched NewSchools, she had a vision: to empower entrepreneurs to transform the educational opportunities for underserved children across the nation. Over the last decade, dozens of these entrepreneurs have created successful organizations that demonstrate that this vision can become a reality.

As in past years, this year’s Summit presented an opportunity to step back and recognize the extraordinary work that these entrepreneurs have done for hundreds of thousands of children. It was also a chance to reflect on the growing visibility of entrepreneurs in major urban districts and to contemplate the next steps involved in translating that impact into broader systems transformation. In the words of NewSchools CEO Ted Mitchell, “We aim to bring together the nation’s education entrepreneurs with a common goal: to make America’s schools worthy of our democratic aspirations as a nation; to make those schools worthy of our children’s dreams and our dreams for them; and, above all, to make our schools worthy of the moral responsibility we bear for the fortunes and life chances of those children too often underserved and left behind by the current system of education.”

Education entrepreneurs have much to share with – and learn from – one another. Our Practices from the Portfolio series seeks to capture, synthesize and share this powerful knowledge residing within the NewSchools portfolio.

For this second volume of Practices from the Portfolio, we identified four critical challenges faced by charter management organizations (CMOs) as they grow to scale. For each challenge, we profiled the practices that three organizations within our portfolio have developed in response. We then collected relevant documents and templates used by these organizations. We believe the resulting set of tools, which are detailed below and cover challenges that range from human capital to performance to home office operations, will inform practitioners as they grapple with these same challenges.

﻿﻿Education entrepreneurs have much to share with – and learn from – one another. Our Practices from the Portfolio series seeks to capture, synthesize and share this powerful knowledge residing within the NewSchools portfolio.

This first volume of Practices from the Portfolio includes some of the most effective practices in use by the organizations in our portfolio, many of whom are working to create new systems of public charter schools. With the help of FSG Social Impact Advisors, NewSchools documented the details of how these practices were developed and implemented, and collected tools and templates used by these entrepreneurial organizations along the way. The result is a set of case studies that we believe will inform practitioners who are looking to improve practice within their own organizations across three areas: human capital, organizational growth, and educational curriculum and quality.

Schools across the nation are confronting the challenge to place an effective teacher in every classroom. Founded by 22 year old Wendy Kopp in 1990, Teach For America (TFA) has brought thousands of talented young people into teaching.

In this forum, Education Next asks Julie Mikuta and Arthur Wise whether Teach For America is a valuable strategy for recruiting the best and brightest into education and energizing school improvement, or a distraction and a device for sending ill-prepared neophytes to serve some of the nation’s neediest students.

Since 2005, NewSchools Venture Fund and the Aspen Institute have convened leaders in educational entrepreneurship, philanthropy, policymaking and research for the Annual Gathering of Education Entrepreneurs in Aspen, Colorado with the support of E*TRADE Financial.

The objectives of the Annual Gathering are to create fellowship among these entrepreneurial change agents and ensure that the whole of these change agents’ work is greater than the sum of the parts by creating a long-term agenda for change.

This year’s Gathering focused on two of the priorities that had come up at the original Gathering in 2005 – human capital and public policy – and also followed up on the geographic concentration work begun at the 2006 Gathering. This report – written by participant Bryan Hassel of Public Impact – describes each of these three discussions in turn.

Like entrepreneurs in any other sector, education entrepreneurs must rely on a variety of resources in their quest for the money, people, and ideas they need to turn their vision into reality.

This paper – written by Kim Smith and Julie Petersen of NewSchools, for a conference on the supply side of school reform convened by the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) in October 2007 – focuses on the “social purpose capital markets” that provide funding to these entrepreneurs. It includes descriptions of the types of investors that comprise this complicated market and how they operate, the flaws in the market’s structure, and the ways in which these limitations could be remedied so that education entrepreneurs may realize their full potential.

This article will also be included as a chapter in a forthcoming book, The Supply Side of School Reform and the Future of Educational Entrepreneurship, edited by Frederick Hess of AEI and slated for publication by Harvard Education Press in summer 2008. This book follows up on a volume released in 2006, Educational Entrepreneurship: Realities, Challenges, and Possibilities, which contained a chapter written by Smith and Petersen that defines education entrepreneurs.